Shows
Wednesdays are matinée days. So naturally, we
had two shows today: the revival
Fiddler on the
Roof in the afternoon and
The Lion
King in the evening. We had the
choice of going out in the morning, but as I had to finish my article for the
Guardian, we stayed in.
The first show was at 2, and we set off to the theatre (which is right around the corner from the Casablanca) to see Fiddler.
We were certain that it was going to be one of those matinees that was teeming with people, but to our surprise it wasn't. Perhaps it was the fact that Alfred Molina, who is playing Tevye, was out sick; but then Philip told me that the revival's been garnering a 70% occupancy for a while now. Of course, it's staged in the Minskoff Theater, which is one of the largest and newest on Broadway, which means that a 70% occupancy isn't a bad one (I'd kill to get a 70% occupancy for Ringplay!). It didn't mean, though, that the seats in front of us — we had orchestra seats near the centre, really good seats — remained empty. They were filled at the very last minute by a family. Thank heaven, though, the people sitting in front of me were children!
Let me tell you, Alfred Molina or no Alfred Molina, I really enjoyed the musical. Of course, Fiddler's one of my all-time favorites, because it's a musical with dark humour and dark undertones and anyone who knows the history of Europe and its Jewish population throughout the twentieth century and knows what's to come is full of that knowledge. Tevye is such a simple, hopeful, wise man, but no matter who he is and what he does, his family — his whole community — is doomed to wander, to suffer, when they're driven out of Anatevka. And the music and the story of the times and the changes and everything else is so big and so all-consuming, and the characters so meaningful, that the story grabbed me more than any other musical so far. Bombay Dreams had the the material, but didn't put it together right, opting for cliché rather than real character and conflict; The Frogs was good fun and had acerbic wit, but the characters weren't really empathetic, being vehicles and caricatures rather than anything else; Avenue Q was wonderful, but in a feel-good, laugh-yourself-silly kind of way; Brooklyn tried to reach the pathos of Fiddler and failed; Wicked was a smaller story with a smaller canvas. Fiddler (confession time) always makes me weep, and it was like that even when we did our own little production of it at Queen's College back in 1978. So I had me a grand old time.
And it was a fine production. It was a revival, and it was faithful to much of the original; I presume the set was new (and inventive), but the dances were all original Jerome Robbins dances, and wonderful.
I loved it.
There. That is a totally subjective opinion!
After the show, Philip steered me to 40th Street to the Drama Bookstore. Now normally we go there like locusts during harvest, but this time was different. Philip had found out by chance that the creators of Avenue Q were doing an interview and a signing at 5:00. So we turned up at the bookstore, made our way into the basement, and waited for the interview to begin. Though we had to leave early, as I was starving and we wanted to eat before The Lion King, the discussion was great.
Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx - a little out of focus, but hey, it was dark.
It was in 50-seat space that they do theatre in, and so it was very intimate indeed, and pretty informal; the feeling was like a class at the Actors' Studio, without the deadpan I'll-never-crack-a-smile of James Lipton. Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx are young, affable and open, and they seem really down to earth and cool. They talked about the genesis of the musical, which emerged from the BMI Workshop, and about their working relationship. Turns out the songs were written before the book, which is a kind of backwards way to write a musical, and they talked a lot about contemporary musical theatre. They're around Manny's age. Then then played a song that was cut from the show ("Tear It Up and Throw It Away" — about jury summonses) and they played the exercise of Jeff Marx's that made Bobby Lopez know he wanted to work with him ("People Suck" — not anything like "It Sucks To Be Me"), and they played the original version of "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" and discussed how they made that song more palatable for a PC audience.
Lopez plays "Tear it Up and Throw it Away" (he's in focus, more or less)
Marx plays "People Suck"
We had to leave by 6:00, as I say, in order to get dinner and to The Lion King, but it was well worth dropping by!
Dinner was seafood at Red Lobster, where they plan to feed the Roman Army with each dish. But we finished in enough time to dash back by the Drama Bookstore to see if we could catch the signing at its end (we didn't) and to scout around for the books we would buy later.
And then The Lion King.
Philip and I have been talking about it since we saw it. First let me say this: it's a fabulous production, and the theatre it's in is a fabulous theatre, the New Amsterdam Theatre. But it was rather like Junkanoo. By that I mean that it's a wonderful evening of spectacle, but you have to wait to see the great pieces.
First, the good stuff. The opening scene, "Circle of Life", in which Mufasa and his wife show their new son Simba to all the animals at the water-hole, is an incredible scene. Those people who don't know much about the show should realize that the way in which the animals are created are by means of life-sized puppets. I say life-sized; having not seen a giraffe or an elephant in recent memory (not having been to a big-animal zoo in decades) I'm guessing that the puppets are more or less the appropriate size. The people operating these puppets in most cases are dancers, some of whom have had to become acrobats. The first thing you see is Rafiki, a woman in the costume of an African healer, singing a song that makes the sun rise, and then the animals come out to the water-hole. The first animals you see are two giraffes, which are operated by dancers on four stilts — two for their feet, two for their hands. Then comes a cheetah, which is a puppet attached to the front of a dancer. Then come an assortment of birds, operated by dancers with the birds on the ends of sticks; antelopes and gazelles; the antelopes are arranged on a wheel that is turned by the operator, which makes them look like they're leaping; the lion pride — a group of beautiful female dancers wearing lion masks as head pieces and doing regal leonine steps. But the highlight of the opening is when the BIG animals appear — elephants and rhinoceri lumbering up the aisles and onto the stage. I can't even describe them; but together these puppets and their dancer-operators perform choreography that signifies their reverence of the new cub and their animalness.
That's the highlight, rivalled by two other scenes in the show for me: one during "Can You Feel the Love Tonight", in which three couples — two in the air, one on the stage — interpret the song in three completely different but equally meaningful pas de deux, and the other when Simba confronts his guilt and speaks with his father-ancestor and decides to take up his role as King of the Animals. Another good scene for me was the stampede of wildebeests which kills Simba's father, which is done in a wonderfully inventive way, using some fantastic staging.
Two things bothered me about the show, though. One was the script; and the other was the performance of the child playing Young Simba. Philip seems to think they are related, and I'm not sure they're not. Either the child is annoyingly overacting throughout the first half (so much so that I enjoyed the second far far better; I liked all the scenes Young Simba was not in — which are few and far between) or the writing of that character is profoundly unsympathetic. I also thought that the adaptation relied too slavishly on the script of the cartoon. The only really new thing — which worked to some extent, and should've been capitalized on even more — was the introduction of Rafiki, who acts sort of as a storyteller and a mentor and a guide. The way to tell this story on stage, I would've thought, would be to make her a sort of narrator-player along the lines of The Leading Player in Pippin, or the Streetsinger in Brooklyn — the Musical, and bring her in more in the first act to provide some kind of commentary. There were a number of scenes in the first act that were tedious because they were too long and seemed to me to be copied too closely from the film; using Rafiki as a storyteller and dancers/mime in the background would've used the strengths of the production — spectacle and dance and new, more authentically African songs and rhythms — while cutting down on the weaknesses — tedium and scenes carried solely by CCS —the Charm of a Child on Stage (which, after enduring Festival, wears pretty thin pretty quickly, believe me).
That said, there were some really good performances: Scar, whose character is probably the best character in the musical, can't lose; the part is a star, although some of the scenes were too long. Zasu, the toucan-advisor, was another great performance, especially because the puppet and the puppeteer were two distinct parts of the character, and because the two have an argument during the first act that is screamingly funny, with the puppet leaping on the puppeteer and flying off on its own. And Timon and Pumbah are also great. I liked them better than I liked their characters in the movie; the puppets and the puppeteers work together in such harmony that it's a pleasure to see. In the second half, the adult Simba was much better — whether better written or performed it's hard to say — and I enjoyed the second half. But it took a long, long time to get there.
The first show was at 2, and we set off to the theatre (which is right around the corner from the Casablanca) to see Fiddler.
We were certain that it was going to be one of those matinees that was teeming with people, but to our surprise it wasn't. Perhaps it was the fact that Alfred Molina, who is playing Tevye, was out sick; but then Philip told me that the revival's been garnering a 70% occupancy for a while now. Of course, it's staged in the Minskoff Theater, which is one of the largest and newest on Broadway, which means that a 70% occupancy isn't a bad one (I'd kill to get a 70% occupancy for Ringplay!). It didn't mean, though, that the seats in front of us — we had orchestra seats near the centre, really good seats — remained empty. They were filled at the very last minute by a family. Thank heaven, though, the people sitting in front of me were children!
Let me tell you, Alfred Molina or no Alfred Molina, I really enjoyed the musical. Of course, Fiddler's one of my all-time favorites, because it's a musical with dark humour and dark undertones and anyone who knows the history of Europe and its Jewish population throughout the twentieth century and knows what's to come is full of that knowledge. Tevye is such a simple, hopeful, wise man, but no matter who he is and what he does, his family — his whole community — is doomed to wander, to suffer, when they're driven out of Anatevka. And the music and the story of the times and the changes and everything else is so big and so all-consuming, and the characters so meaningful, that the story grabbed me more than any other musical so far. Bombay Dreams had the the material, but didn't put it together right, opting for cliché rather than real character and conflict; The Frogs was good fun and had acerbic wit, but the characters weren't really empathetic, being vehicles and caricatures rather than anything else; Avenue Q was wonderful, but in a feel-good, laugh-yourself-silly kind of way; Brooklyn tried to reach the pathos of Fiddler and failed; Wicked was a smaller story with a smaller canvas. Fiddler (confession time) always makes me weep, and it was like that even when we did our own little production of it at Queen's College back in 1978. So I had me a grand old time.
And it was a fine production. It was a revival, and it was faithful to much of the original; I presume the set was new (and inventive), but the dances were all original Jerome Robbins dances, and wonderful.
I loved it.
There. That is a totally subjective opinion!
After the show, Philip steered me to 40th Street to the Drama Bookstore. Now normally we go there like locusts during harvest, but this time was different. Philip had found out by chance that the creators of Avenue Q were doing an interview and a signing at 5:00. So we turned up at the bookstore, made our way into the basement, and waited for the interview to begin. Though we had to leave early, as I was starving and we wanted to eat before The Lion King, the discussion was great.
Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx - a little out of focus, but hey, it was dark.
It was in 50-seat space that they do theatre in, and so it was very intimate indeed, and pretty informal; the feeling was like a class at the Actors' Studio, without the deadpan I'll-never-crack-a-smile of James Lipton. Bobby Lopez and Jeff Marx are young, affable and open, and they seem really down to earth and cool. They talked about the genesis of the musical, which emerged from the BMI Workshop, and about their working relationship. Turns out the songs were written before the book, which is a kind of backwards way to write a musical, and they talked a lot about contemporary musical theatre. They're around Manny's age. Then then played a song that was cut from the show ("Tear It Up and Throw It Away" — about jury summonses) and they played the exercise of Jeff Marx's that made Bobby Lopez know he wanted to work with him ("People Suck" — not anything like "It Sucks To Be Me"), and they played the original version of "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" and discussed how they made that song more palatable for a PC audience.
Lopez plays "Tear it Up and Throw it Away" (he's in focus, more or less)
Marx plays "People Suck"
We had to leave by 6:00, as I say, in order to get dinner and to The Lion King, but it was well worth dropping by!
Dinner was seafood at Red Lobster, where they plan to feed the Roman Army with each dish. But we finished in enough time to dash back by the Drama Bookstore to see if we could catch the signing at its end (we didn't) and to scout around for the books we would buy later.
And then The Lion King.
Philip and I have been talking about it since we saw it. First let me say this: it's a fabulous production, and the theatre it's in is a fabulous theatre, the New Amsterdam Theatre. But it was rather like Junkanoo. By that I mean that it's a wonderful evening of spectacle, but you have to wait to see the great pieces.
First, the good stuff. The opening scene, "Circle of Life", in which Mufasa and his wife show their new son Simba to all the animals at the water-hole, is an incredible scene. Those people who don't know much about the show should realize that the way in which the animals are created are by means of life-sized puppets. I say life-sized; having not seen a giraffe or an elephant in recent memory (not having been to a big-animal zoo in decades) I'm guessing that the puppets are more or less the appropriate size. The people operating these puppets in most cases are dancers, some of whom have had to become acrobats. The first thing you see is Rafiki, a woman in the costume of an African healer, singing a song that makes the sun rise, and then the animals come out to the water-hole. The first animals you see are two giraffes, which are operated by dancers on four stilts — two for their feet, two for their hands. Then comes a cheetah, which is a puppet attached to the front of a dancer. Then come an assortment of birds, operated by dancers with the birds on the ends of sticks; antelopes and gazelles; the antelopes are arranged on a wheel that is turned by the operator, which makes them look like they're leaping; the lion pride — a group of beautiful female dancers wearing lion masks as head pieces and doing regal leonine steps. But the highlight of the opening is when the BIG animals appear — elephants and rhinoceri lumbering up the aisles and onto the stage. I can't even describe them; but together these puppets and their dancer-operators perform choreography that signifies their reverence of the new cub and their animalness.
That's the highlight, rivalled by two other scenes in the show for me: one during "Can You Feel the Love Tonight", in which three couples — two in the air, one on the stage — interpret the song in three completely different but equally meaningful pas de deux, and the other when Simba confronts his guilt and speaks with his father-ancestor and decides to take up his role as King of the Animals. Another good scene for me was the stampede of wildebeests which kills Simba's father, which is done in a wonderfully inventive way, using some fantastic staging.
Two things bothered me about the show, though. One was the script; and the other was the performance of the child playing Young Simba. Philip seems to think they are related, and I'm not sure they're not. Either the child is annoyingly overacting throughout the first half (so much so that I enjoyed the second far far better; I liked all the scenes Young Simba was not in — which are few and far between) or the writing of that character is profoundly unsympathetic. I also thought that the adaptation relied too slavishly on the script of the cartoon. The only really new thing — which worked to some extent, and should've been capitalized on even more — was the introduction of Rafiki, who acts sort of as a storyteller and a mentor and a guide. The way to tell this story on stage, I would've thought, would be to make her a sort of narrator-player along the lines of The Leading Player in Pippin, or the Streetsinger in Brooklyn — the Musical, and bring her in more in the first act to provide some kind of commentary. There were a number of scenes in the first act that were tedious because they were too long and seemed to me to be copied too closely from the film; using Rafiki as a storyteller and dancers/mime in the background would've used the strengths of the production — spectacle and dance and new, more authentically African songs and rhythms — while cutting down on the weaknesses — tedium and scenes carried solely by CCS —the Charm of a Child on Stage (which, after enduring Festival, wears pretty thin pretty quickly, believe me).
That said, there were some really good performances: Scar, whose character is probably the best character in the musical, can't lose; the part is a star, although some of the scenes were too long. Zasu, the toucan-advisor, was another great performance, especially because the puppet and the puppeteer were two distinct parts of the character, and because the two have an argument during the first act that is screamingly funny, with the puppet leaping on the puppeteer and flying off on its own. And Timon and Pumbah are also great. I liked them better than I liked their characters in the movie; the puppets and the puppeteers work together in such harmony that it's a pleasure to see. In the second half, the adult Simba was much better — whether better written or performed it's hard to say — and I enjoyed the second half. But it took a long, long time to get there.
Posted: Wed - October 6, 2004 at 11:53 PM
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Published On: Oct 08, 2004 12:58 PM
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Published On: Oct 08, 2004 12:58 PM